BijouBlog

“An overly sensitive person, incapable of dealing with any opinions that differ from their own. These people can often be seen congregating in ‘safe zones’ on college campuses.” 

Thus saith the Urban Dictionary, perhaps summarizing this new idiom bandied about by mostly conservative pundits. 

I find the comparison, actually, rather inept, because what is snowflake, literally? 

Wikepedia gives you the answer: 

A snowflake is either a single ice crystal or an aggregation of ice crystals which falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. Each flake nucleates around a dust particle in supersaturated air masses by attracting supercooled cloud water droplets, which freeze and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes emerge as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another, but may be categorized in eight broad classifications and at least 80 individual variants. 

What I am getting from this definition is strength and diversity. In fact, no two snowflakes actually look alike (like people, even twins). Perhaps the fear of diversity could perhaps be read into the pundits’ use of the word here, but, as the definition above states, a snowflake or a group of snowflakes are originally ice crystal. Yes, the original ice melts, but its impact as snow can be quite powerful: 

Once snowflakes land and accumulate, they undergo metamorphosis with changes in temperature and coalesce into a snowpack. The characteristics of the snowpack reflect the changed nature of the constituent snow crystals. 
 

Yes, get a bunch of snowflakes together, and watch out. The resulting impact, morphing the sarcastic words of Ida in Mildred Pierce when she pointedly refers to Mildred’s gigolo boyfriend/husband/stepfather and lover of the spoiled Veda (eerily like the winner of the election in his narcissism and amorality): Don't look now, Junior, but you're standing next to a falling snowpack. 
 

I wish the retro Chicagoland figure Suzy Snowflake could, like Glinda threatens to do to the Wicked Witch of the West, just say begone, lest someone drop a house on you, to the forces of evil that are taking over this land. 
 

In fact, at this juncture, it’s small comfort to lapse into the cliché that after winter comes spring, which would not occur without the healing, cleansing darkness and beauty (just look at snowflakes close-up) of winter. 

I do think, though, that snowflakes like me who really believe in truth and beauty, if not causing a violent avalanche, can work behind the scenes, like the seed in the ground growing secretly, to overcome the evil so that we don’t face a silent spring where no birds sing. 

I heard that a neighbor of Bijou Video's new office location (West Lakeview or West Wrigleyville) knocked on the door, claiming he was expressing concern shared by people in the neighborhood about the adult nature of the business.

First of all, how did this person find out? But then, websites like everyblock.com often report business licenses and building violations. Useful of course, but depending on one's motivation, the potential for harmful gossip, stereotyping, or even blatant prejudice exists.

Secondly, it's not like we are actually making adult movies. We sell vintage gay porn. Vintage. Like 30-40 years ago. Perhaps the neighbors thought they would see half-naked men parading in and out of the place and camera on the street. But then, would the neighbors be complaining if an individual was making amateur porn from his/her apartment and selling it via the web? Perhaps, but then the person is not doing this activity as an official business, and if it's consensual adult sex, whose business is it, anyway, privately or publicly? And, it's not like we are doing anything that would physically disturb a neighbor, which might be the case if one was making and selling porn in one's apartment. Police Scanner Log: 1500 West Bryon, loud sex noises coming from apartment 3S. Constant blasting of music. Buzzer keeps ringing. None of this goes on in our office.

Most significantly, I find it perplexing but sadly believable that the complaint may contain roots in the straight frat boy culture of this area (which also was the case in the latter part of our Wells Street tenure). I am sure around here half-naked straight jocks parade around getting drunk and vomiting an publicly urinating (the last activity strikes me as more pornographic in a kinky sense) and create an atmosphere where violence to women can occur. I would be much more concerned about such behavior, which escalates when the Cubs play home games at Wrigley Field and especially on St. Patrick's Day.
 

If you've been following the LGBT media in particular, you've undoubtedly heard for some time about the Fascist-style scapegoating of LGBT persons in Russia by forbidding “gay propaganda” that supports “non-traditional sexual relations,” pretty much an excuse for police state tactics ranging from censorship to house searching to arbitrary arrests of protestors beaten up by homophobic thugs. 

In the early stages of their power, the Nazis burned books and shut down museums that showed “decadent art” (like Picasso and the Bauhaus school). They left one modern art museum open on the third floor of ramshackle building, according to James Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to show how offensive it was in comparison to the official state art; the lines were so long to get in that the Minister of Culture had to, much to his embarrassment, shut it down! 
 

The decadent art of Putin's Nazi-style Russia is exemplified by the now infamous “Putin in Women's Underwear” painting by artist Konstantin Altunin.

Altunin's painting was seized by the Russian police from the “Museum of Power” gallery in St Petersburg for breaking unspecified laws. 
 

The police also removed from the gallery, housed in two rooms of a flat in the city, a picture depicting the head of the Russian Orthodox Church with his torso covered in tattoos, and two artworks mocking anti-gay lawmakers Vitaly Milonov and Yelena Mizulina. 

St. Petersburg deputy mayor Vitaly Mironov, who features in a further painting where his face is merged with the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement, said that the pictures were inappropriate and “of a distinctly pornographic character." How is a rainbow pornographic? 

Gallery owner Alexander Donskoy said as well as seizing paintings, the police also shut down his gallery and offered no explanation for their acts. 

The parallels here to the Nazi regime are obvious, but what's even more disturbing is Altunin's fate. Like most exiled artists of the past, he found refuge in Paris.

But he's not lounging around in cafes sipping cafe au lait or hobnobbing with gallery owners by the Seine; according to his wife Elena (who still lives in Russia with their young daughter), he is living rough on the streets. 

There are so many issues of serious concern here, but I do wonder if boycotting vodka and the Winter Olympics or a presidential reprimand of the dictator's policies is going to ease up on the oppression. There's a strong contingent of Westerners (mostly those holy haters) who support Putin's policies.

And despite outcries from popular celebrities like Lady Gaga and others, the average fan may pay lip service to the endorsements, but he or she is more concerned with the latest song. Social media both aids and harms the cause (the antigay thugs in Russian are using the Internet to lure unsuspecting gay victims to beat and kill). 

Many people these days don't know about the St. Louis, a ship that carried 900 Jewish people ostensibly to asylum in Cuba in the 1930s as part of a Nazi propaganda campaign to show that the government was willing to take care of the “Jewish problem” in a humane way. The Nazis knew full well, however, that neither Cuba nor, if Cuba refused them, the United States would accept them. The ship had to turn back, but luckily France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Britain took the exiles in. This incident has been called by many “The Voyage of the Damned.” 
 

Would the United States (or any Western country) be willing to do the same if Putin wanted to dispose of his current scapegoat en masse in the same way? That's the question all citizens of the West need to wrestle with.

The answer might not be a resounding yes, even in a time where all forms of pluralism, including sexual, are becoming the norm.

Remember that famous scene from Network when Peter Finch urges everyone in America who does not feel valued in a chaotic world to open their windows and yell, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!”